Jefferson Airplane house on Fulton fragment

Someone posted a photo of an old house in San Francisco, wanting to know its history. I immediately recognized the place, even though it was painted white. Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane band lived at the corner of Fulton, the big Edwardian style Victorian was painted black. I think the Corinthian columns were painted gold, or trimmed with gold paint. I remember the blue and green shag rug in the living room, with a sunken square tile tub, and a baby grand with red roses on it. My friend Kevin was selling dope to a bandmate in the kitchen, so my friend Carolyn played something classical on the piano, and Grace came out snarling and screeching wearing nothing more than an ecru trimmed babydoll negligee at 4 PM. Her hair was a rats-nest, and she had raccoon eyes from smeared makeup. Not a pretty sight. She tried to throw us out, but we merely went into the kitchen instead—where everybody was gathered round the kitchen table smoking and drinking strong coffee in the afternoon sunlight. An indelible memory. Then they all moved to West Marin and we saw them all the time. They hung a model biplane from an oak tree in front of their house in Woodacre. I used to ride my horse by their place all the time. Some pix.

'Tween Worlds

You know the Robin Williams line—even if he didn't say it: if you remember the 60s, you weren't really there. But we were really there. Meanwhile Gertrude Stein said: There is no there there. And there you have it as my grannie would say. What Robin should have said: Remembering it is tricky, at best.

SFchronicle_vault Dec. 9, 1987: Robin Williams hangs out with comedian Will Durst (left) after Durst lost a mayoral run. We're thinking that's Vera Carp of "Greater Tuna" on the right. 📷: Chronicle Archive

I follow a couple of Facebook groups and we've posted collective memory threads from multiple perspectives. Some of my recent blog posts are outtakes from those threads. Sometimes the outtakes gel, sometimes. they're merely placeholders of an idea I might revisit later.

We were reminiscing what it was like growing up between times during those turbulent years. Part of the backstory was the anniversary of the May 4, 1970 Kent State Massacre (which I didn't include). These outtakes are from random fragments that drifted in and out of that series of dialogues.

For some reason, though we lived in the epicenter of this sociological turmoil, it's hard to write about it so, from time to time, I whittle away at it, in search of the through line. Memory's always a work in progress.

I told Colorado poet, Art Goodtimes, a mushroom aficionado, that I had a wild mother who claimed I was an amanita child. As if that explained things. We laughed and blamed the drugs.

However, I was pretty straight, I was also very young. I was 14—a mere 'tweenie at the original 1967 "A Gathering of the Tribes Human Be In" in Golden Gate Park. It was a protest gathering to counter a new California law to make LSD illegal.

Timothy Leary famously said from the stage, "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and then came tripping out through the audience to give my mom a hug.

A Beatnik and a Project Artaud painter, my mom was one of the first artists to embrace the hippie movement. She was also one of the first artists to transform and live inside the Hamms Brewery vats—but that's an '80s story of punk rockers & hippie wars. Mom dragged me through the Haight early and often. Sometimes our worlds intersected. I was a wide-eyed kid trying to take it all in.

(I'm leaping ahead in my story here. The problem with a run-on memory fragment is that it's a challenge to force it to toe the timeline of congruity. Not an easy thing when the 60s' are invoked.) My mom knew Kush of Cloud House. She got around. She was featured in Whitman McGowan's poem-video, White Folks Was Once Wild Too. That's her dancing around the bonfire.

sfchronicle_vault June 1959: Allen Ginsberg flips through a Jack Kerouac book at a San Francisco bookstore. The Beatniks, as named by Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, had a positive influence on visual arts, performing arts and music. They challenged the values of a conservative city. And they built a foundation for a progressive future. 📷: Joe Rosenthal

I didn't know it at the time, but I was meeting future mentors of our generation: Richard Alpert "Ram Dass"), Allen Ginsberg, who chanted mantras, Gary Snyder, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jerry Rubin. Most of the bands who played were near neighbors: Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

I grew up between worlds and times in the San Geronimo Valley, a rural enclave which was rapidly becoming an alternative lifestyle destination. A lot of interesting folks shunned the cities and suburbs wound up in The Valley, as it was called. It was an uneasy marriage of radically different worlds.

I attended Lagunitas School District—LSD ('splains a lot). I was straddling the old redneck ranchers' world (living with my Irish Victorian grannie), and the Flower Children dancing in the dawn of a New Age—and me, trying to toe the mutable line. Not an easy task. 

During the late 60s, I attended Sir Francis Drake High School—the only high school (emphasis on the word high) in the nation to shut down a local draft board. 

We were a pretty radicalized group of kids. Our class president was Jared Rossman from Fairfax. That last name shoulld ring a bell—as in his older brother, Michael Rossman, a key figure in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964. When we shut down the San Rafael Draft Board, we made the cover of Time Magazine and the 6 O'Clock news. And gave the FBI a new client list.

When the school district took away our buses, I was the kid hitching home from school. How I met most of the rock musicians of that era, Ken Kesey and his cast of Merry Pranksters, and boarded Further, etc.

I was living out in rural West Marin and commuting into the suburbs to go to school, holding onto a dual life between worlds while most of my friends were defecting, tuning in and dropping out, and running off with bands or the circus. It was some crazy times. Somehow we grew up between the Be-in, The Summer of Love, and the Kent State Massacre. This was our legacy.

Yes, we were really there. And we do remember. Robert Frost wrote: The best way out is always through. We survived the 'tween years—we could see no other way out but through. What a long, strange trip it's been.



My related blog post

Ken Kesey

Hitching in Marin during late 60s, early 70s

Note bene: for some reason someone, who posted a comment as "Anonymous" took umbrage to this post and wrote "b.s." Of course I didn't publish it—as they didn't bother to sign their name, nor did they say why they thought it was b.s. It's my past I'm writing about, so how is it b.s.? Maybe he thought it was made up. Who knows? Clearly he was full of b.s. for posting it. And so it goes. I invite comment and dialogue, but not b.s.

Sutton & Tristano

I stumbled upon a Facebook thread by a Lagunitas School classmate, Kevin McConnell, who posted a link to Pete Sutton's dad, Ralph Sutton. I'd totally forgotten that Ralph, who tickled a mean Maple Leaf Rag in his time, played some of his famous stride piano compositions at a school assembly concert when we were all very young. But after Kevin posted it, minute fragments drifted back from the imperfectly shelved memories of childhood.

What I did remember, was, being surprised to hear such a complex arrangement of chords and cartoon music churning out of the cranky old school piano. Magic music from a strange man dressed in a gray suit who looked more like a school principal (or maybe Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman) than a famous jazz musician. Kevin said that the jazz concert inspired him to become a musician. Me, not so much.

And the vague memory fragment of that concert goes a long way in explaining why my classmate Pete Sutton's best friend, Steve Tristano, was standing on the piano bench banging out a rollicking Boogie-Woogie on the piano at recess. We were all rockin' out. That music was so radically different than the somber proscribed chords of the  America, the Beautiful. The teacher, hearing the infernal ruckus, came bursting into the classroom, apoplectic. We were all so busted.

From this incident, I learned that certain types of music was forbidden, therefore delicious. I also feared our 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Burge, was going to have heart failure right in front of us. I'd never seen such a show of emotion from our right-proper 50s school-marm teacher.

There was always a lot of counterculture going on in the San Geronimo Valley in the late 1950s, and early 60s. But we were so young and we knew no other life—living out so far from the towns and the growing suburbs. Many famous musicians and artists and writers took refuge in The Valley as the Marin Beat scene havens, including Mill Valley and the former fishing village of Sausalito, were beginning to erode into the effluent of mainstream acceptability.

Steve was born with his musical talent. Our 2nd grade Boogie-Woogie champ was the son of another famous jazz musician, Lennie Tristano. But great jazz musicians were also absenteé fathers—always on the road—or more notably playing the clubs in New York, where the real action was.

So to see Ralph Sutton was unusual as it was to see the blind piano player, Lennie Tristano. People often lumped Sutton & Tristano's names together, and said that they were famous jazz musicians in New York. But in retrospect, I can't imagine such a synthesis as they were both such very different musicians.

A bit of San Geronimo Valley apocrypha: Scott Joplin (with whom I share a birthdate) was said to have visited the Valley in the 1890s, and allegedly wrote Maple Leaf Rag at Frank "Speck" McAuliffe's bar in Lagunitas.

Don't know if there's any truth to the story—other than countless would-be ragtime piano players have banged out that archetypal ragtime hottie on every available piano in the Valley. But chances are pretty good Scott Joplin hammered out a rendition of it at Speck's. What was the bar called before Speck McAuliffe bought the place since this was before his time—Lagunitas Tavern & Livery?

Before you go, Whoa there, Nellie! Teddy Roosevelt had a cabin in Lagunitas—Argentina House—and used to water at the Lagunitas trough when he got all hot and bothered. And Joplin was no stranger to The Valley. (Nor were José Revere (Paul's kin), or Alexander Graham Bell—who set up the first telephone in the Dollar barn on Dickson Ranch.)

Teddy Roosevelt liked The Valley for its wildness and isolation. He famously exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West."

Another Boogie-Woogied classmate, Adair (Lara) Daley once dubbed The Valley in her SF Chronicle column as The Valley that Time Forgot. Growing up in West Marin, we were all so far west of the west, we met ourselves coming and going. Often shunned by the townies, we were our own universe.

COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS (Summer of Love) long v.

I grew up on Turtle Island. I was an unwilling player during the revolutionary birth ot the 60's and the Summer ot Love. Some ot it had to do with age, or lack ot it on my part. I was 14 and uptight. Half of my friends ran away to the Haight Ashbury and the other half practiced making their necks as red as the necks of their blue-collar parents'.

My mother turned me on with green oatmeal cookies. Actually, it was an accident. We were at her gay friend's house in Larkspur having dinner. A friend, Sue Williams and I helped ourselves to the big cookie jar. We couldn't understand why they made such a fuss, and wouldn't let us have any more health food chocolate chip cookies loaded with that weird green shit. Ugh!

Why were they watching us so oddly as we corn-braided and beaded each other's long hair, danced, and wove peace symbols on the shoebox we converted to a finger loom? My mother went along with my frenzied creative urges before I fell into a narcoticised dreamstate while Janis wailed and crooned on the stereo:

Take it!
Take another little piece of my heart
now baby
you know you got it
if it makes you feel good

A life size poster of Grace Slick wrapped in an American flag sung to me from the wall and the air filled with visual debris.

Micaela and I crashed parties on The Charles Van Dam ferry boat stuck in the Sausalito mud at an angle that almost rivaled that of the Spreckles House. Jean Varda's geometric blue and red paintings nailed to the curved ferryboat wall, defied horizon and plum-line logic. 

We sneaked into the captain's brig that served as a loft and watched the party below us carry on. While our parents were turning on and dropping out, we ran wild in the streets. Sneaking off to the Avalon. Fillmore. Winterland. Sometimes finding our parents there before us. My mother was very hip and my reverse rebellion kept me straighter than most of my friends.

The drug experimentation blossomed in kalidascopic exponentials. Crazy people got crazier. My mother checked out all Ken Kesey's acid tests. Took me to the Panhandle. Parties and concerts in Golden Gate Park. The Be-in. Magic Mountain of Marin. Clouds of incense roiling out of the Psychedelic Shop. People sleeping in doorways. Crash pads with wal-to-wall bare mattresses, sinks filled with putrid dishes, mountains of rotting garbage, incense and patchouli oil made me wary of acid and hard drugs.

Various rock groups divided up the San Geronimo Valley like musical mafias. Jefferson Starship hung a model bi-plane from a bay tree in Woodacre. The Grateful Dead were mostly encamped in Forest Knolls, while Big Brother and the Holding Company took over the barracks at Barbano's summer camp on Arroyo Road. Mrs. Barbano rented the dorms to them, but after her daughter was killed by a car in Mexico— something to do with dope; Mr. Barbano shot himself in the head. Walking home from school, I remember him all white and red as if asleep on the gurney as they wheeled him into the ambulance.

Most afternoons, when the shadows grew long and chill settled into the gulch, the hills reverbrated with the distorted screaming of electric guitars. My friend Micaela quit coming home from school, dropped acid with the musicians at Barbano's instead, and I felt betrayed by this.

We ran from one end of the San Geronimo Valley to the other searching for dope. And the rock stars were our best bet. Most of the musicians never got out of bed until afternoon—that was the time to score, and hang out for a jam session. Bill Bowan, the drummer for the Sons of Champlain, always had grass and there was even an abandoned van parked at Dead Man's Curve in Lagunitas for lovers in search of a bed. John McBride often took advantage of that pad on wheels.

It wasn't just the rock stars who moved into the San Geronimo Valley. Those fleeing from the Haight. From LA, or New York, everybody began to migrate westward like lemmings to the sea. 

House of Richard took over the old dance hall in Forest Knolls. I sold my first chain crocheted caps there, and in exchange, bought hay for my horse. Richard told me how the border police, looking far dope, tore apart their VW van after a textile buying trip in Mexico. Even the tires were removed from the rims. The disciples of the Summer of Love moved to the Valley enmasse. 

COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS

COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS

"If you remember the '60's you weren't really there."
— Robin Williams

I was an unwilling player during the birth of the 60's and the Summer of Love. Some of it had to do with age, or lack of it on my part. I was 14 and uptight. It was an accident but my mother turned us on with green cookies. We couldn't understand why they made such a fuss, and wouldn't let us have any more cookies loaded with weird green stuff. Why were they watching us so oddly as we corn-braided and beaded each other's hair and wove peace symbols on an improvised shoebox the finger loom? Janis Joplin wailed and crooned on the stereo:

Take it!
Take another little piece of my heart
now baby

A life size poster of Grace Slick wrapped in an American flag sung to me from the wall and the air filled with visual debris. We crashed parties on The Charles Van Dam ferry boat, sunk rakishly in the Sausalito mud. Varda's geometric blue and red paintings nailed to the wall defied horizon and plum-line logic. The drug experimentation blossomed in kalidascopic exponentials. Crazy people got crazier. My mother checked out Ken Kesey's acid tests. Clouds of incense roiling out of the Psychedelic Shop. People sleeping in doorways. Crash pads with bare mattresses and sinks filled with rotting garbage, reeking of incense and patchouli oil.

Big Brother and the Holding Company took over the barracks at Barbano's summer camp on Arroyo Road. After Barbano's daughter was killed by a car in Mexico— something to do with dope; Mr. Barbano shot himself in the head. Walking home from school, I remember him all white and red as if asleep in the ambulance.

Most afternoons when the shadows grew long and chill settled into the gulch, the hills reverbrated with the distorted screaming of electric guitars. My friend Micaela quit coming home, dropped acid at Barbano's, or hung out at one of the Grateful Dead pads instead, and I felt betrayed by her abandonment.

We ran from one end of the San Geronimo Valley to the other—searching for dope. And the rock stars were our best bet. It wasn't just the rock stars who moved into the Valley. Those fleeing from the Haight, or New York. We all dealed.

At The House of Richard, once the old dance hall in Forest Knolls, Richard himself, told me how the border police tore apart their VW van looking for dope after a textile buying trip in Mexico. Even the tires were removed from the rims.

Kerouac On the Road. Cassidy at the wheel. Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass floated into town. Alan Watts was staying with a former Jesuit brother at the Heart Sutra House. There was no time for recording history. In Mary Mackey's English class at Drake High School (emphasis on high), we studied the lyrics on the Revolver album. We tried another high. Someone issued a warning that morning glory seeds were coated with poison. Heavenly Blues turned deadly. A friend in the slammer for dealing. Rumor of another petty dealer turning up dead in an oil barrel in the San Rafael canal for double-crossing a dope dealer. Hendrix dead. Joplin dead. Bobby dead. The vets. All those dead coming home in boxes.

We traded Zap Comix for dope. The school narc married red-headed Kelly, a friend of mine. My art teacher Warren Fairbanks (who went to school with my mom), married my classmate Rachel and moved to Bolinas. No one else bothered to get married. We watched light shows at the Fairfax Pavillian. Everybody's made Time Magazine as the first health food store in the US.

Things got hopping on the Bolinas Mesa. Lots of writers climbing aboard Turtle Island. Gary Snyder talked about this place as if he owned it; I thought I could write like him. What's the big deal? So I began my apprenticeship.

Moulton's store in Forest Knolls burned down and there wasn't much to downtown except hang outside the Valley Tavern, or at the train platform. The same was true about Lagunitas. Some say, the boy who set his own house on fire, killing two younger brothers, torched this building too. Some say he burned down all the historic wooden buildings in The Valley.

Tensions rose. Old Man Bevans, out gardening on the old railroad bed between Castro and Sir Francis Drake Blvd at Arroyo Road, went vigilante and stuck his rake through one Hell's Angel's tire spokes. When the Angel got done with Old Man Bevans there wasn't much left to hospitalize. Everyone started selling out. Land was subdivided. Dairies went under. One could feel the change in the wind.

Gurus and TM moved to Marin. Then, the EST graduates. Most of us moved on and became ex-patriot. I moved from Forest Knolls to Forestville. Little did Lew Welch know when he wrote "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings," that there was nowhere else left for us to go. It was no longer a question of need. Houses desecrated the sides of the goddess, Mt. Tarn. Ken Kesey, the Merry Prankster headed north to greener pastures.

Life magazine ran pictures of the war in full color, they're still etched in my mind like shadows of Hiroshima. My mother checked in and out of mental wards like they were revolving doors. She wanted me to read One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest so I could understand shock therapy. I waited in hospital wards with wax-yellowed and green tile floors with curved corners for my mother to make her grand entrance in a blue hospital gown and paper slippers.

One pill makes you whiter

And one pill makes you small 

The ones that mother gives you 

Don't do anything at all

On the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I'm working with the crazies at Napa State Hospital. The inmates have their poems memorized. I can't remember any of my poems all the way through. I meet a friend of my mother's, Sally Lacy, an inmate, who raised an eyebrow, and wants to know what I'm doing in a place like this. It's like a 60's time capsule here. Do I tell them that of all the artists, poets are the most often institutionalized? Depending upon how one looks at it— maybe it's those who are locked up who are closer to poetry. The nuthouses are breeding poets. The trickster Coyote has holes in his pockets.

The Summer of Love wore down like a bad trip. Vietnam. Reagan brought out the National Guard at People's Park; brothers and sisters fell. As we marched, we shielded our faces from the FBI who took photographic aim from the top of the Zim's Drive-in tower in San Rafael. Zim Boy grinning down at us and waving.

People moved to the country and joined communes like Limelighter Lou Gottleib's Morning Star Ranch in Sonoma, or moved to the Eel River. Some went back to the land and raised families. Most cut off their hair, bought suits and joined the rat race. Jerry Rubin. Yuppies. Baby boomers, baby carrots and raduccio.

Bitter vets returned home and were treated like aliens from another planet. John Lennon gunned down in New York by some crazy wanting fame, and 20 years later, we like to think a revolution is brewing. Punk rock. The children conceived during that Summer of Love have come of age in an era of violence and apathy. And Lew Welch, with a gun to his head, walking off into the wilderness for the last time because there was no way left to remind the planet of its smoky gentleness. Turtle Island is shaking again. In what form will the revolution take this time around?

6/1987
added 6/17

More S o L

• COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS (Summer of Love) long v....
• COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS

Summer of Love, etc.
A revamp from an earlier post from 2013, 'Tween Worlds

A related blog post: Ken Kesey

Prior claim

A turmoil of images bombarded me when I got home. As I drove down Nicasio Road, I reached for pen and paper but instead grabbed a dull kitchen knife. Then I grabbed a pencil with no lead. Then I grabbed the gauge for the tires, all apt symbols.

My neck collar prevents me from seeing what I am writing. And I hold onto connected fragments that I'm not able to record. Only to lose them all. No placeholders.

I drive by RuccaRucca Ranch, and am flooded with memories. The first time I rode Frankie's horse around Nicasio Reservoir, she was so sure it was alive, she was shivering, and it was all I could do to get her to walk along the fire road. We sat around in the kitchen drinking strong coffee and smoking dope while Jerry and Micky jammed in the living room.

I think of the Grateful Dead and the obscene amount of money they used to buy that land. I loved their music, and can recite all the names of the rock stars in the Valley, the Grateful Dead Jefferson Starship, Santana. But when their records sold, they suddenly had lots of money, and they bought up chunks of the land. And our taxes went up.

We smoked dope and danced at RuccaRucca Ranch but underneath it all I never allowed myself to be seduced by it all. Perhaps this is why I refused to buy their records in the first place. I was a conscientious objector.

Last night, Jane was raging on about communism, while we were there protecting them, they were taking our freedom. I ask, what has to do with Nicaragua? I am apolitical. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Byron. We are all suspect. I believe my friends in Nicaragua are telling the truth, and the truth has many faces.

I had forgotten how loudly the pine trees roar when the north wind circles the valley. Or how the stars look more correct framed by this particular fold of hills, or how difficult it is to write left-handed.

Over Pt. Reyes Road, while writing this down, a finite shifting of gears, wordplay and interplay make both writing and driving barely possible. I have a hard time going home it's even harder to leave west with the night. Beryl Markham wrote: if you have to leave home, do it swiftly, go as far as you can, and never come back.

I am even more enraged when my rage toward my mother softens. She reaches over me to dip her hands into the sunlight from the south window. I think my hatred is so thick sometimes it clots the air. She says she gets depressed when she can't go outside.

The wind howls, and catches itself on the corners of the house and in the hexagonal sieves of the chickenwire fence outside. I am a spy here. Taking notation. This disengages me from some of the rage.

All of the new owners of this land, part of which I hold a shared trust in, on a piece of paper for unbuildable allotment of land that I want to return to, and can never seem to leave behind.

So many strangers have grown into their justified rights of ownership. There's a new no trespassing sign on the corral gate. Is it  meant for us we who actually own the land, by our very years here, have prior claim, or do the newcomers?

These newcomers have been here a while now, these strangers who can never fathom the memories I hold. Horse Hill, the old hitchingpost, now someone's faux castle. On the path by Arroyo Creek where I rode by my horse in summer, now has three new houses—three white elephants rising huge in Bianchi's field. I feel physically ill by their presence. This progress we measure by planting massive houses over the green fields of the past.